Business as usual in the Southern Hemisphere

- India get hammered against SA
- Durban gets another sub-100 score from India
- Only Sachin and Rahul look anywhere close to being capable of facing up to the music
- SA has a truckload of pacemen who can deliver chin music
- India's spinners struggle

- Australia mount yet another 300 plus score on Day 1 of a critical Test series
- Ponting hammers yet another century in Australia. He is probably the best player of pace bowling in the world
- England come a cropper yet again on Day 1 of the Ashes
- Brisbane looks beautiful and bloody hot

Who says sport is unpredictable?

Lara the megastar

Watching Lara take on Kaneria and gang as I write this - the effortless ease with which he can turn it on is just way too amazing. He is 58 off 46 balls, and the ability to find the gaps and also clear the outfield is unparalleled.

I was listening in to the Cricinfo Roundtable discussion, where everyone (Ian Chappell, Wright, Ravi Shastri and Tony Greig) ranked him as the best in the world. Their assessment was based on the fact that he dominates better than everyone else (read Sachin and Ponting), he looks great while in full flow and has done it better than everyone else against all attacks, against world class spin and in all conditions. I agree - but not fully.

At his best, he is the best in the world, no question about that. If there was a one off match against the best from Pluto, you would probably pick Lara at his best (or Ponting on current form). However, if you wanted someone to play the entire year against all forms of opposition and want consistent aggression and class, you would pick Tendulkar at his best (which means the late '90s). Lara is the one-off maverick, Ponting now is the big match bull, and Sachin is the consistent high class performer.

Update 2: Still going strong, our man. 165 not out at a run a ball. His manhandling of Kaneria and Shoaib Malik is outstanding to watch. How can we forget one of his greatest abilities - to be able to convert 100s into big, big ones. 400, 501, 375, 277...
Update 1: 4-0-6-6-6-4 off one Kaneria over before I could finish the post above, and he has rocketed on to 92 off 63! Lara added 40 runs before I could finish one blog post. Can anyone else do that in a Test match?? Away from home??

ICC Champions - not so bad after all

The event is proving many sceptics wrong, completely by accident. Bad surfaces usually create interesting matches. Throw in other factors like the dew, and you are bound to get a few upsets, strange matches and unpredictability. We now have a situation where there is every possibility that a major cricket tournament being held on the slow, low pitches of the Indian subcontinent may well have no semi-finalists from Asia. Who would have thought that was possible?

My money was on Sri Lanka going all the way, and there are out of the tournament already. Pakistan are being Pakistan - blowing hot and cold. India struggled to a loss against the Windies yesterday in a bizzare match yesterday, and now have the huge task of defeating Australia to go through.

On most of these pitches, a score of 250 seems to be a high score, and the dew is messing up the captains' minds more than anything else. No one really knows how this tournament will pan out in the end - which suits the ICC well. The pity, of course, is that this came about completely by accident - if the ICC could change anything, they would have asked for pitches where 300 was the minimum the team batting first had to get. So in a strange fashion that is unique to cricket, the tournament is better off because of the lack of quality in the pitches.

Last observation - Manjrekar got it right, cricket in India is no religion. It is Indian cricket that is the opium of the masses. Embarassingly empty stands greet every other match. Blame it on the ticket prices, blame it on saturation-level cricket on TV, blame it on big city distraction - it indeed looks ominous for cricket in general when ODIs in India are played to empty stands. I could actually see many empty seats yesterday when India played WI. Now that was unthinkable! Strongest statement yet by the fans that the administrators better get their house in order - i.e. quality over quantity, better pricing and value for money in the stadium, and most importantly - focus on the cricket, not merely on the finances.

You Tube - an unbelievable story

Can you even begin to believe this? 2 young buggers like you and me go to a dinner party in SFO, shoot a video and want to share that with friends. They try sending email but it just keeps bouncing back. They try to upload it on the Net, but it is too much of a hassle. What would you and I do? Just say, fuck it, not worth the damn effort. What did these guys do? Go into their garage (probably the garage does the trick!!! - did too with HP, Google etc) - and came up with a simple technical/user-driven solution called You Tube. If you don't know what they heck You Tube is, you must be living under a rock or something. They built an easy-to-upload and use video sharing site, and brilliantly, developed the concept of community around it. People could share videos, comment on it, blog about it, swap it around etc. Suddenly, in America and rest of the broadband-driven world, people started watching and sharing TV soap clips, porn, sports clips, porn, funny home videos, porn at their convenience - not when the big networks wanted them to watch. How cool - but since all of this was for free, what next? Businessweek asked this question a few months back, and concluded the article, well, without a serious conclusion. How could they monetise this please?

Well, they did, and how! None other than big daddy Google paid a fuckintastic, unbelievable, crazy 1.6 billion $ (yes, with a b, not a m) for this! The damn founders are bloody 29 and 27 still! The rest of the world is shaking heads with disbelief. This cannot be true.

Take a look at these buggers - the founders who suddenly are richer by atleast 200 mill $ each! Appropriately, in a you Tube video. That could so easily be you, me, or the class back bencher from your school/college. No one can be so damn smart/lucky - whichever way you look at it!



So how will Google recover that money? It is a lot of money by even Google's standards. Obviously their strategy is to monetize the millions of visitors' eyeballs with the video version of Adwords. How it will pan out is a billion $ question. It is one thing to have unobtrusive text ads, quite another to put video ads on a home video of 3 chicks dancing the Ho Dance in Chelsea! And what about copyright problems? A huge % of videos are in clear copyright violation - but hey, that is the Net isin't it? Interesting, very interesting.

By the way, one of the founders (Steve Hurley) is a design guy - logos and stuff (did the design for Paypal), and the other dude (Chan) is a techie geek - comp. science etc. No MBA, no nothing. Just an idea, the guts to do it, and the vision to expand the horizons, the right environment (Silicon Valley, the VC network, the concepts etc) and sheer luck. Wonderful stuff!

England football = Indian cricket

I always drew the parallel between the passion England have for football (passion is too mild a word perhaps) and how Indians feel about cricket. That was a reasonable no-brainer to deduce. Dileep Premachandran here takes that further, and provides a wonderful point of view - the England football team is in fact very similar to the Indian cricket team. His arguments are persuasive - hanging of the hat on one or two matches (India V Aus 2001, Eng V Germany in Munich), 1 World Cup win last century each, focus on megastars (Tendulkar/Dravid, Gerrard/Rooney), Chappell/Eriksson, and more recently John Terry and Dravid.

Beautiful, isn't it? In fact the one major difference I see here is that atleast English fans have one of the world's best domestic leagues, where they get quality football every week, whereas us poor Indian fans just get to watch one team battle it out. A lesson there for all concerned?

The ODI debate

Rohit Brijnath is one of the best sports writers around - based in Australia now, it is unfortunate that he does not write more regularly on Indian cricket/sport (he does have a weekly in the Hindu, and occasionally in BBC website, but little else). I remember his Sportstar writing vividly, and wasn't he a host of a TV sports program on DD many moons ago?

Please take the time off to read this wonderful piece on the glut that is one day cricket.

The entire conversation of cricket has altered. Debate on footwork or whether spinners should toss the ball up has vanished, an old appreciation slowly leaching out of the stadium. Instead, we are now a reactive audience.

The world's finest batsman once is now Tendulkar one day, Endulkar the next. Sehwag is God with every six and devil when caught on the boundary. Captains are hailed at 20 overs and heckled at 40.

There was a time when I remembered everything there was to remember about every cricket game played, especially if India was involved. I don't, anymore. When did Dravid score an ODI century last? When did Kumble last pick 4 wickets in an innings? Do you remember a recent McGrath ODI spell where he took out the top order cheaply? I don't. I know that generally India are losing more than they are winning - but I don't immediately recall what the scoreline was when Pakistan came to India in 2005! You know things are getting out of hand when you start forgetting India - Pakistan encounters.

Mercifully, my Test cricket knowledge has remained reasonably intact - obviously because India plays very little Test cricket nowadays, and personally for me Test Cricket is quite enjoyable.

Look, I am not being this snooty English-media fed bugger who claims Test cricket is the ultimate, and everything else is hogwash. I think one day cricket and Twenty20 cricket are very entertaining, and are responsible in more ways than one for reviving Test cricket worldwide. My grouse is with the quantity - which has a serious effect on quality. Cricket series must have a meaning, a set routine and must build on a sense of anticipation. There must be something more than just the day's match to play for. When India played the Test series in the Windies this summer, they were playing for a first series win outside the subcontinent for donkeys' years. Now that is memorable. Contrast that with when India played in KL later on in a tri-series. Contrast that now with the Ashes - with a 100 year plus history. The World Cup has huge merit - and so will the Champions Trophy - only if the ICC got its scheduling right. I am also looking forward to India touring South Africa this Nov - to see how Dhoni, Raina and the young uns cope on the first real test of pace and bounce. The ODIs and Tests there will be exciting to watch.

It does not take an advanced degree in space research or the intellect of Duckworth and Lewis to come up with a schedule that provides meaning and context to bilateral series for both Tests and ODIs. Then, and only then, will every ODI played have relevance and meaning tonight's TV analysis and tomorrows' screaming headlines. I shudder to think of what will happen if and when countries start scheduling stand-alone Twenty20 tri-series in Papua New Guinea just because they have the weekend off.

Less, sometimes, is really more.

Good old Pakistan cricket

"If God wants I will obviously lead the side one day."
Mohammad Yousuf bypasses Pakistan's national selectors
- Cricinfo

Pakistan cricket - What would we do without them?

3 captain changes in 2 days, the Chairman resigns 2 months before his term expired, the Manager sacked, the Assistant coach sacked for no apparent reason, some more office bearers resign/sacked, rumours about the suspended captain also being sacked, the first Test match forfeit ever, ball tampering/match fixing/ [replace with scandal of the season], fervent calls to God at the drop of a hat/player or grant of a Man of the Match Award, the President/Dictator for Life having a say on their arch-rivals' hairstyles, ex-greats sniping at each other, current prima donnas strutting around like Brit rock stars - it has them all!

I feel for the average Pakistani cricket fan - infuriating does not begin to describe what it must feel like to support this motley crew.

How sad was that engine blow out?

Did you watch the Suzuka F1 yesterday? Did your gut wrench? Ugh it was sad wasn't it? I am a big time Schumi fan - so I definitely felt bad that after leading so easily and taking a big step towards winning an unthinkable 8th World Championship, the damn Ferrari engine (which has been so unbelievably reliable) had to blow up at that bloody race!

Schumi, who has won pretty much everything there is to be won in F1 many times over must have felt immense disappointment - here was a championship that was gone for all money 8 races ago, and then to script an amazing turnaround on your last year on the circuit, and to see your prized asset - the Ferrari reliability - fail when comfortably in front of your closest rival - that feeling is something I wish I never have to experience.

What makes it worse is that the whole thing was being set up beautifully for a winner-take-all in Brazil. Now Alonso has to pretty much turn up and win the Championship.

It definitely ruined my day.

Big bad world

14 countries (6%) done, 200 odd to go! The world is a huge place, and here's where I have been. Neat tool from here.



create your own visited countries map

Here's what I would like it to be in a year's time please, thank you God! No, not asking for much- just 16 more, including a lot of them small ones in the West Indies.



create your own visited countries map

The Tendulkar myth

You know what I really hate about Tendulkar scoring a century? The attitude of many of my fellow countrymen - who immediately go 'oh, so what, India will now surely lose' - like it is a siamese-twin type occurance. Tendulkar century - India lose - joined at the bloody hip!

What utter bullshit - I feel like screaming. Heck, I have, many times over the years.

Yesterday was no different. Our man scored a wonderful century not out while everyone around him in his team struggled. Remember, he was coming back from a 6 month+ layoff. India notched up 309, with Sachin getting nearly 50% of the runs. Trigger enough for the blue blooded Indian fan to all but hand over the winners cheque to the Windies - why? because Sachin scored a century, so surely, but surely, India will lose!!!

Just when the match was shaping up nicely with the Windies taking the battle right up to the Indians, the heavens opened up, giving Duckworth and Lewis a chance to weave their sheer magic and brilliance again - and India actually lost. Did I sense a whole bunch of guys going - there we go again, see see India lost, you know why - because Sachin scored a century!

Here's my point - what the f*@$ can Sachin do to prevent Mr. Rain God from making his presence felt? I realised, 10 minutes of spleen-venting later, that I was cutting short my time on Planet Earth. I therefore turned to Encyclopaedia Cricketica - i.e. Statsguru. Some fiddling around gave me the stat I was looking for. Here goes -

Tendulkar has scored 40 centuries in ODIs (yes, that many. No, no one is close. The next highest, if you must know, is a gentleman called Ganguly, at 22)
India have won 28 of those matches (yes, that means 70%. yes, a significant number)
One no result, so India have lost 11 of the 40 games (27.5% of the games - yes, a big enough number, but not as big when you relate it to context of the strength of the Indian team over the years and the sheer base on which we are operating - 40 games is a lot of games).

Granted, Lara, Ponting, Jayasuriya and even Ganguly have much better winning percentages, but they have all scored half the number of centuries notched up by Sachin. That is staggering, and the percentage is not vastly different (Lara 85%, Ganguly - 81%, Ponting - 80%, Sachin - 70%).

So please, Sachin haters, appreciate the man for what he is worth. India wins much more often when Sachin scores a century. Let him go for it - ok? Good for your health and mine.

The real thing

Awkward pitch, with many balls keeping low, and many others rearing chest high from good length.

Tendulkar wannabe #1 (Sehwag) - clean bowled playing back to a pitched up ball that kept low.
Tendulkar wannabe # 2 (or Sehwag wannabe #1 - Dhoni) - clean bowled playing back to a pitched up ball that kept low.

The current God in the batting line up (Dravid) - LBW, playing back to a pitched up ball that kept low.

Tendulkar - 100* and going strong (as I write this).

Ashes fever already

The Ashes is over 2 months away, there is an ICC tournament before that, and Australia are engaged in an ODI series in KL as we speak - but England and Aus cannot wait for the Ashes to start. Nothing else matters to England - though Australia seem to care that little bit more about the World Cup. ICC Champions Trophy - what's that now?

The Internet is buzzing with stuff re: the Ashes - yesterday England announced its team (on the anniversary of last year's fantastic series win at the Oval). I personally cannot wait for the Ashes - it will be terrific to watch, if England turn up fit and fine. English pundits are a bit worried - Boycott does not rate England's chances that highly, Mike Selvey is worried that England are carrying far too many players recovering from injury (why is that such an English trait?) - but the best writing on the Ashes this year will be from Tim de Lisle, who will be blogging on Cricinfo. I love his writing, and the blog format will encourage him to be more opinionated and incisive. Good fun, all of this!

I hope Australia stack up their online presence soon - Ian Chappell blogging will be great to read, as long as he does not mention Dougie Walters! Ian Healy can be counted upon to be to the point, and Mr. Steve Waugh must please get his hands dirty on the Internet.

My early prediction - Aus win this 3-1. All other caveats and disclaimers and what-ifs will come later.

A superstar if there ever was one

'Great' , 'superstar', 'genius', 'legend' - words used so loosely we don't even know what it signifies anymore. Dhoni has been called all of these, and he has not even faced quick bowling in Aus/SA yet. Sania was called all of these - and she is struggling to get past Round 1. The England football team (and Gerrard/Lampard/Beckham) were elevated to planetary status but couldn't make any impression in the World Cup.

However, one man richly deserves all these words - in fact they should perhaps retire one of these words along with him - so it is not used like confetti. M. Schumacher announced his retirement yesterday, and the world he dominated will never be the same again. To win one race in a sport that just 20 can participate in is great - but to win 7 world championships, to be on the verge of winning the 8th, to be on top of his art for over 15 years, to dominate and to be more hungry than fitter youngsters and to generally be synonymous with a sport where luck plays such a huge part is nothing short of genius.

Yesterday's race was indicative of his presence. Even though he qualified second behind Kimi, there was somehow a feeling of inevitability that he would get eventually win - which he did comfortably - timing his pits perfectly, generating the fast laps when it mattered (when Kimi pitted) and just pulling away easily to win.

Yesterday's press conference was also very instructive of his achievements. Flanked on both sides by teenagers in a sport meant for drivers like them, he clearly showed the world why he is special.

I got initiated onto F1 like many boys my age thanks to the nature of the sport - adrenalin, speed, glitz - I stayed on because of Schumi. And I am not the only one.

That is the man's power. A superstar if there ever was one.

Lage Raho Rajkumar Hirani and gang

I have pretty much stopped watching movies - too long, too hackneyed, too boring, too crowded, too braindead for my liking.

However, we went yesterday to Lage Raho Munnabhai and boy, did we enjoy it? Hilariously funny, thought-provoking, fast-paced - excellent movie. The hero, in my book anyway, was the director and screenplay writer - Raju Hirani and a dude called Abhijat Joshi. Kudos, gentlemen - to have the balls to write a script like this, weave in Gandhiji, make the whole thing contemporary, add humour, keep the pace going for 3 hours, and make it appealing to SEC A guys like wifey and me, as well as lower SEC junta in rural Bihar. It requires a special creative talent to make something like this happen.

If you haven't watched it, please go. I recommend a good multiplex, buy some good food and drinks, pay a bit extra for good seats and indulge yourself. We spent a good 600 Rs for food, parking and tickets - can't think of better ways of spending that money.

Sonia - please don't come to Blore

Apologies to my massive reader base for disappearing from these pages for a while - things have been very hectic at work - air travel in India is marginally better than tooth extraction, and I have been doing a lot of flying lately.

I chose to venture out this Sunday in Bangalore - and regretted every single moment of it. Sonia and her cohorts vandalized Bangalore, screwed our already-overflowing roads, and created enough havoc on what should have been a peaceful Sunday. A journey that should take 15 mins took 2 hours. A stranded few still haven't reached home!

200,000 people with nothing better to do were shepherded into government buses, tempos, rickety vehicles with 3 1/2 wheels and tongas - all with the promise of 100 Rs, some food and lots of illicit liquor in packets (sarai). I bet my bottom paisa that 98.25% of the attendees wouldn't have understood a word of the pearls of wisdom spouted by the lady with the accent.

I spoke to a guy who was asked to come, but refused - he was very happy because his neighbours went, saw and came back thirsty - let alone sarai, they didn't even get a glass of water to drink.

What a strange country we live in - where 85 year old people come in from far-flung villages to watch an Italian-turned-Indian dole out some shit for TV consumption. And the lady had the gall to criticize the current Govt. for showing apathy towards Bangalore's infrastructure problems.

Madam, you are part of the problem. Please conduct such rallies in some remote village - don't add to the mess that we are in already. Please don't come! Please!

Too much of a good thing!

All year long, the Brits long for the freakin' Sun, struggling to keep the cold out and struggling with the miserable rain. And now they can't stand it when the heat is on. These Brits, I tell you! 36 degs and they want out. Please come to Delhi in the summer, dearies - 47 and counting will make you all yearn for peak January winter.

As Obelix says, these Britons are crazy!

Thank God for British humour

In a bloody mad world, where cannot-be-rationalized shit happens (Zidane's head butt, The Mumbai serial bomb blasts and the Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah conflict), I sincerely recommend a strong dose of good old Brit humour to make sense of it all. Call me escapist, but if the damn terrorists (and the apparently accused - like Zidane was) could read up such stuff, they would have far less time to create damage.

Thank you, Martin Johnson, for livening up cricket, and life, for me!

The hell hole called Koramangala

Koramangala used to be a very beautiful, very posh and very nice extension of Bangalore 10 years back. I remember my first job in Bangalore, with the office on the main Koramangala road just 200 meters from Raheja Arcade. The road was spacious, not too much traffic, the restaurants were great and it was a place one aspired to come to/live in/hang out etc. The travel time from my home to Koramangala (distance ~ 12 km) was not more than 30 mins.

Come 2006, and one visit to Koramangala is enough to convince any die hard city slicker to dump it all and move to the Amazon with a fishing rod in hand and Odomus in the pocket. Getting into Koramangala from any side is pretty much impossible. Try the Dairy Circle route - the flyover (which took 100 years to build) has cleared up that junction, but has pushed the traffic jam to just after the flyover ends (opposite Christ College). 30 mins is on par to cross Christ College and the Forum at peak hours. Try the Indiranagar side, from the Inner Ring Road. Just after the Sony Showroom, be prepared for undefined traffic logjams (could vary from 30 mins - 1 1/2 hrs) between Canara Bank and BDA Complex and beyond. Try Silk Board and Madivala - same bloody story, and the oneways don't help either.

Net net, the only option is perhaps a drop from the sky via helicopter.

What's happening (according to me anyway) is that flyovers are being done on all sides - Dairy Circle, Silk Board and Indiranagar Inner Ring Road - but the heart of the matter is left undisturbed. Traffic has grown exponentially, and the roads within the locality have remained the same. This has led to a logjam that logically cannot be cleared unless traffic reduces, because there is no place to expand roads!

Why, oh why did this come to such a pass?
The supreme irony, however, is that 2400 sq feet sites go for anything between 1 crore - 1.5 crore now. Surreal, crazy, simply unexplainable!

Yay a significant series win overseas

- At last - something to savour. A serious Test series win overseas against meaningful opposition.
- History will probably forget that this Windies team was one of the weakest ever.
- History will forget that we could have won this 3-0 atleast.
- Dravid was an absolute colossus - really!
- Kumble was terrific throughout - amazing how he can keep churning out performances like this when it matters, and increasingly overseas as well.
- Poor Sachin - missed out this series, and may actually end his career without ever being part of a team that won overseas.
- Ganguly who?

No, this is big. This is real big, for a starved nation. Why does it not feel so? Is it me? Is it the football? Is it the awkward timings of the matches? This must be BIG. I guess it will be, soon enough!

What do I know about football?

Nothing at all, absolute zilch!
After all, I predicted foolishly that Riquelme and Messi and Crespo would be the attacking force that would put German aspirations to rest. How was I to know Argentina would prefer the defensive tactics usually used by Germany and Italy? What do I know?
Was I crazy to assume Rooney, Gerrard and Lampard - absolute stars for their respective English clubs where they scored goals at will - would be able to even half-replicate that form in an England shirt? Of course I was - and I was plain stupid to ignore England's terrible penalty kicking!
However, my biggest blunder has to be the absolutely naive assumption that a bunch of 11 brilliant footballers should make a hald decent team with attacking intentions. Wrong, plain wrong! Ronaldinho/Ronaldo/Adriano/Kaka/Robinho simply cannot score when they play with each other against a half decent organized team, evidently!

So there you have it - 3 of my 4 predictions went totally awry, and my grandmom predicted Italy would win, so that is no consolation.

What do I know about football? Or was the penalty shootouts football at all?